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Bravely, it seems, John Barrymore--who notably struggled with chronic alcoholism that would lead to his death at age 60 in 1942--plays the has-been actor Larry Renault who was also addicted to the bottle. And just like his character Renault, he was in the death throes of a third marriage, one that would end within a year.See more »

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Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Carlotta gives Ed her dog, introducing him as "Tarzan", her lips don't match the word.See more »

Among the great actresses who have helped to illuminate the silver
screen, Marie Dressler may be Chateau d'Yquem  a grand premier cru, in
a class all her own. As aging star of the theatuh Carlotta Vance, a
living relic of the 'Delmonico' era in New York, she walks away with an
immortal movie, as entertaining a contraption as the studio system ever
confected. And she does it effortlessly, despite some very tough
competition  the most lustrous talent MGM could summon in the worst
year of the Depression, and maybe the best it was ever able to gather
together in the many constellations it assembled.

Dressler heads a large ensemble cast, with several distinct but
interlocking stories, all leading up to (but never quite making) a posh
dinner party at the mansion of Billie Burke, wife of shipping magnate
Lionel Barrymore. Desperately trying to snag (the unseen) Lord and Lady
Ferncliffe  moldering aristocrats she once met at Cap d'Antibes 
Burke bullies and badgers everybody she can think of to seat a swank
table. Worrying about nothing so much as how 'dressy' the aspic will be
 it's the British Lion molded out of a quivering gelatin  she's
oblivious to the human dramas whirling around the people on her guest
list.

For starters, her husband is not only seriously ill but close to
bankruptcy, to boot. Down in his nautical offices on The Battery, he's
paid a visit by an old (and older than he) flame, Dressler; a bit down
on her luck herself ('I'm flatter than a pancake  I haven't a sou'),
she wants to sell her stock in his company. Another visitor, one of the
sharks circling around to feast on his bleeding empire. is Wallace
Beery, a loud-mouthed boor whom Barrymore nonetheless cajoles Burke
into inviting, against her snobbish sensibilities. Beery, a politically
connected wheeler-dealer, has problems of his own, namely his wife Jean
Harlow. She lounges luxuriously in bed most of the day, changing in and
out of fur-trimmed bed jackets and sampling chocolates while waiting
for her doctor-lover (Edmund Lowe) to pay another house call under the
pretext of tending to her imaginary ailments.

Burke's and Barrymore's young daughter, meanwhile, conceals a
clandestine affair with 'free, white and 45" marquee idol John
Barrymore, a washed-up drunk whose grandiose airs can't even fool the
bellboys he sends out for bottles of hooch (a storyline in the
screenplay, co-written by the also alcoholic Herman J. Mankiewicz 
from the George S. Kaufmann/Edna Ferber stage hit  that can't have
been comfortable for the similarly afflicted Barrymore, who's even
referred to in the movie by his emblematic sobriquet 'The Great
Profile').

Those are the major strands of the story, but there's even more talent
on board: Louise Closser Hale as Burke's pithy cousin; May Robson as
the cook in charge of the ill-starred aspic; Lee Tracy, as John
Barrymore's exasperated agent; and, deliciously, Hilda Vaughn as
Harlow's mercenary maid.

The goings-on range from the farcical to the tragic, and for the most
part, the cast does proud in coping with the often drastic shifts of
tone (true, some episodes carry more weight than others, some players
less inspired than their colleagues; it's an episodic movie, at times
dated, from the infancy of talkies when scenes were not a snappily
edited few seconds but prolonged and often stagy).

Still, in this starry cast, Dressler shines brightest. A Canadian gal
who started in the circus, she worked in vaudeville, theater, and, in
the last few decades of her life, in Hollywood. Despite her girth and
the delapidations gravity had worked on her face, she's never less than
transfixing. She tosses off the requisite comedy as effortlessly as
that oldest of pros that she had become, yet can draw the camera to her
deeply kohled eyes when she imparts some very bad news and turn it into
a few seconds of threnody. (Only Barbara Stanwyck commands so boundless
a range, which we have the luxury of observing over several decades of
her career; what survives of Dressler dates only from her few last
years.) Dressler would make but one more movie before her death, but
it's chivalrous to think of Dinner At Eight as her grand exit.

As Dinner At Eight winds down, the aspic never makes it to table, nor
do some of the expected guests. But life plods on, if capriciously and
unfairly. Burke, at the end of her tether, utters a plangent cry that
sums up man's impotence against the cruelty of fate:
'Crabmeat...CRABMEAT!'

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